Abstract
The R sound exhibits considerable variability both across and within Arabic dialects; one that covers place and manner of articulation, as well as the notorious emphatic-plain distinction. Some R phones are in contrastive distribution, while others are contextually conditioned or free variants. This article aims to establish the underlying R phonemes in the spoken varieties of Arabic, evidence of which is sought in R’s dialect-specific phonological behavior: in minimal pair contrasts, distributional phenomena, loanword phonology, and phonological processes that target or are triggered by R. Investigation of such evidence reveals four major patterns based on the nature and number of R phonemes, consequently classifying Arabic dialects into four types: the split-R dialects (primarily Maghrebi and Egyptian dialect groups), the emphatic-R dialects (the Levantine group), the plain-R dialects (the Gulf group together with most peripheral dialects), and the uvular-R dialects (the qeltu-dialects of Mesopotamia). The analysis employs a minimalist, contrast-based model of feature geometry to characterize aspects of the attested R’s – such as emphatic-ness, coronality, dorsality, and sonority – and shows that the typology is directly mirrored in the representation. This has theoretical implications as well. Diverse rhotic representations within closely related language varieties demonstrate that distinctive features should not be interpreted as rigidly as is often assumed, and call attention to the semi-arbitrary relationship between phonetics and phonology.
Highlights
This article is the first thorough and systematic treatment of the phonological behavior of rhotics in the geographically disperse varieties of spoken Arabic
We look for clues in distributional and segmental phenomena, which help us formalize the feature composition of the various R phonemes
4 Type I: The split-R dialects The first group is characterized by the existence of two contrastive phonemes: a plain /r/ and an emphatic /rʕ/, and mainly comprises the Arabic dialects spoken in Africa, which fall under three traditional dialect families: (1) the so-called Western or Maghrebi dialects of North Africa; viz. Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Libyan, and the Ḥassānīya dialect of Mauritania; (2) the Egyptian dialects spoken in Egypt and Sudan; and (3) a few peripheral dialects spoken in sub-Saharan Africa, e.g. Nigerian and Chadian Arabic, and in Anatolia, e.g. Mardin, Siirt, and Şırnak Arabic
Summary
It substantiates the related claim that rhotics can be better defined by their distributional and phonological patternings than by specific phonetic characteristics Third, it proposes that a strong structuralist position on phonemic contrast is sufficient for describing the representational categories of a language or language variety. The paper provides a good case study demonstrating the elusive behavior of R within a language It argues that R can have a featural composition in one dialect and a different composition in another – contingent upon phonological behavior. For example, the place of articulation of phonetically alveolar R, where we find three specifications: primary [coronal], primary [coronal] and [dorsal], and primary [coronal] with secondary [dorsal] Such discrepancies provide support for a weak or semi-arbitrary relationship between phonological entities, in the form of natural classes or features, and their phonetic expression.
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